Ascribed to Sir Antonio More (Flemish: 1572-1578).
1872. VIRGIN AND CHILD.
Alvise Vivarini (Venetian, painted 1461-1503).
All visitors to Venice are familiar with a picture, in the church of the Redentore, of the Madonna and Sleeping Child, with two playing angels; there is a bird on the curtain above, and some fruit on the parapet below. It is one of the most charming little pictures in Venice, and is usually shown as a work of Giovanni Bellini. Modern criticism assigns it, however, to Alvise Vivarini, to whom an important place in the history of Venetian painting is now accorded as an artist developing on lines independent of the Bellinis, and as the Master of Lorenzo Lotto.[255] That he was largely employed in the Ducal Palace we know from Vasari, who describes his works there, commending more particularly their fine perspective and "portraits from the life so well depicted as to prove that this master copied nature very faithfully." These works, begun in 1489 and stopped by the artist's death in 1503, were destroyed in the fire of 1577. Of his extant works, the earliest one, which is dated (1475), is at Montefiorentino. The altar-piece in the Venice Academy is dated 1480, and that in the Berlin Gallery is probably of the same period. To a later date are assigned the Madonnas of the Redentore and S. Giovanni in Bragora at Venice, and the present picture. His latest work, finished after his death by Marco Basaiti, is the large altar-piece of St. Ambrose in the Frari.
This picture (which is signed on a cartellino on the parapet) is, says Mr. Berenson, "delightful as a composition. The Madonna is seen down to the waist, holding the Child on a parapet, while behind her, to the left, a window opens out on a charming landscape. The Madonna's face has a tinge of almost Botticellian melancholy, as in Lotto's Recanati altarpiece. The Child is almost the putto on the right in the Redentore picture, but somewhat more bony. The draperies already have the freedom of Alvise's latest works." The picture, formerly in the Manfrini Gallery, was presented by Mr. Charles Loeser in 1898.
1895. BARON WAHA DE LINTER OF NAMUR.
Jacob Jordaens (Flemish: 1593-1678).
Jordaens, who stands next to Rubens and Van Dyck among the great Flemish painters, was a fellow-pupil with the former under Adam Van Noort, whose daughter he married in 1616. In the same year he became a member of the Painter's Guild of St. Luke, being described as a "water-colourist"; his first works were in fact paintings in distemper and cartoons for the tapestry workers. By 1620 his fame as a painter of pictures was established. His works, which are very numerous, are of all kinds of subjects, but he is little represented in British Galleries. Examples may be seen, however, in the Wallace Collection and the Dulwich Gallery.
The name of the sitter is on the frame; his coat of arms and crest, with the inscription "Aetatis suae 63, 1626," are on the upper corner of the picture. It is a fine portrait, characteristic of the exuberance and vigour which mark the work of Jordaens.